‘Yeah, but if. Go with it for a second. I’ll owe you the quid.’
I don’t laugh. ‘Whatever.’
‘Say Aislinn thought some gang was involved in disappearing her da. And say she didn’t get any satisfaction out of Missing Persons.’ Steve’s being tactful. He means, say some bitch gave her the brush-off.
‘Why the hell would she think that? She didn’t say anything about gangs to me. She was all about how perfect Daddy was; she’d have lost the plot if I’d suggested he ever had a parking ticket. And the gang boys don’t waste their time disappearing normal decent citizens.’
‘Maybe she didn’t know that. We know she was naïve; maybe she thought gangs were like the villains in stories, going around looking to grab people just out of badness. Or maybe she found out the da wasn’t as much of a saint as she thought. There are normal decent citizens who get mixed up with gangs.’
I say, reluctantly, ‘I think he was a taxi driver.’
The gang lads love getting taxi drivers on side. All their own cars are on watch lists, under surveillance half the time, occasionally bugged. A taxi man can ferry drugs, guns, money, people, all under the radar.
‘There you go,’ Steve says triumphantly, on it like a puppy on a treat. ‘He gets tangled up with the bad boys, puts a foot wrong, ends up in the mountains with two in the back of the head. Missing Persons can’t prove it, but they know the story, and when Aislinn talks to your mate he lets something slip. She decides to do a bit of her own investigating; before she knows it, she’s in way over her head . . .’
‘Her bookshelf,’ I say. I’d rather keep my mouth shut and hope this whole bloody thing will go away, but I suppose Steve’s earned his extra treat. ‘Book on missing persons, right next to the one on Irish gangland crime. Both of them full of underlining.’
He practically bounces. ‘See? See what I mean? Doing her own investigating.’
‘Fuck this might-have crap,’ I say, pulling out my phone. This is one of the ways I know, no matter what the shitbirds in Murder try to gaslight me into thinking, I’m not just some ball-breaking humourless bitch that no normal person could work with: I got on grand in Missing Persons. I didn’t make any bosom buddies, but I had a few laughs, a few pints, I was in on a medium-disgusting running joke involving one of the lads and a squeaky rubber hamster; and I can still ring up anyone I need to. ‘The guy I sent her to was Gary O’Rourke. I’m gonna ask him.’
Gary’s phone rings out to voicemail. ‘Gary, howya. It’s Antoinette. I’m gonna owe you a pint; I need a favour. I’m looking for a guy who went missing somewhere around 1998 or ’97, give or take, so it might not be in the computer – make it two pints. Guy called Desmond Murray, address in Greystones, taxi driver, aged anywhere between say thirty and fifty. Probably reported by his wife. You might remember the daughter, Aislinn; she came in looking for info, a couple of years back. I need whatever you’ve got sent over to me ASAP. And can you tell your guy to make sure he gives the stuff directly to me or my partner Moran, yeah? Thanks.’
I hang up. Ten minutes ago, I was enjoying this case. I liked that; it made a nice change. And now, just like that whiny voice warned me, it’s finding a way to turn to shite.
‘The brainless fucking bitch,’ I say.
Steve’s eyes widen. ‘Say what?’
‘You know something? If I ditch this gig, I’m gonna set up as a therapist. A new kind, specially for people like Aislinn. For a hundred quid an hour, I’ll clatter you across the back of the head and tell you to cop yourself on.’
‘Because she might’ve got herself mixed up with a gang?’
‘I don’t give a shite about that, if it even happened, which you still haven’t convinced me.’ I’m crossing the road fast enough that he has to jog a step or two to keep up; a car whips past inches from our arses. ‘No: because she was twenty-six years old and chasing after Daddy, whining for him to fix everything for her. That’s fucking pathetic.’
‘Come on,’ Steve says, catching up on the footpath. ‘This isn’t some spoilt Daddy’s girl ringing him to change her flat tyre. Aislinn’s dad leaving pretty much defined her life, and not in a good way. We don’t know what she went through; we can’t—’
‘I bleeding do know. My da split before I was even born. Do I look to you like I’m mooning about, dreaming up ways to find him and throw myself into his arms?’
Which shuts Steve up. It shuts me up, too. I didn’t know that was gonna come out of my mouth till I heard it.
After a moment he says, ‘I didn’t realise. You never said.’
‘I never said because it doesn’t matter. That’s my point. He’s gone; gone means irrelevant. End of story.’
Steve says – carefully: he knows he could get hurt here – ‘Are you telling me you never thought about him? Seriously?’
I say, ‘I did, yeah. I thought about him a lot.’ There should be a special word for that level of understatement. When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realise I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty storeys above my dizzy view. ‘I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.’
Steve, God help us, is trying to find the right level of compassionate. I say, ‘Jesus, the face on you. Don’t be giving me the big sad eyes, you sap. I was like eight. And then I grew up and copped myself on, and I realised this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups do.’
‘And now? You don’t think about him any more?’
‘Haven’t thought about him in years. I mostly forget he existed. And that’s what Aislinn would’ve done, if she had the brains of a fucking M&M. Her ma, too.’
Steve moves his head noncommittally. ‘It’s not the same thing. You never knew your father. Aislinn’s da was someone she loved.’
Probably he has a point, sort of, but I don’t care. ‘He’s someone who was gone. Aislinn and her ma, they could’ve got on with life, figured they’d deal with the answers when and if they got any. Instead they decided to make their whole lives all about someone who wasn’t even there. I don’t care who he was; that’s pathetic.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Fucking pathetic,’ I say. ‘End of story.’
Steve doesn’t answer. We keep walking. Up ahead I can see the car, right where we left it, which is nice.
I want Steve to talk. I’m feeling for any difference in him: the distance he keeps from me, the angle of his head, the tone of his voice. The reason I don’t tell people about my father, apart from the fact that it’s none of their business, is that they hear the story and move me in their minds, either to the box marked Ahhh poor pet or to the box marked Skanger. Steve grew up a lot like I did – probably he was a little posher, lived in a council house instead of a council flat and had a da with a job and a ma who put those lace things on the back of the sofa, but he would have been in school with plenty of kids who didn’t know their daddies. I’m not worried about him getting snobby on me. But Steve is a romantic; he likes his stories artistic, with loads of high drama, a predictable pattern, and a pretty finish with all the loose ends tied up. I woul
dn’t put it past him to imagine me as the tragic abandoned child fighting her way through her demons to a better life, and if he does I’m gonna have to smack him across the head.
He’s not throwing me gooey looks, at least, or walking closer to support me through my pain. All I can tell, out of the corner of my eye, is that he’s thinking hard. After a while he says, ‘What if she found him?’
‘What’re you on about?’ The relief makes me sound snotty.
‘The secret guy Aislinn kept ditching Lucy for. The guy in the pub.’ Steve goes round to his side of the car and leans on the roof while I dig for my keys. ‘What if it wasn’t a boyfriend, after all? What if it was her dad? She tracks him down, they’re trying to rebuild their relationship—’
‘Ah, Jaysus. That does it.’ I want to floor it all the way to Rory Fallon’s gaff and arrest the hell out of him, before it can turn out that Aislinn was having heartwarming reunion rendezvous with Daddy and I have to listen to all the syrupy details. ‘That’s four quid you owe me. No’ – when Steve grins – ‘I’m gonna lose my bleeding mind if I have to put up with this if shite any longer. I don’t even want to think about Aislinn’s da until Gary rings back and gives us the actual story. Meanwhile, you’re not getting into this car till you give me my four quid.’
I jingle the keys and stare him out of it till he reaches into his pocket and shoves a fiver across the roof of the car. ‘Where’s my change?’ he demands, when I pocket the fiver and unlock the doors.
‘By the time we get back to HQ, you’ll owe it to me anyway. Get in.’
‘OK,’ Steve says, swinging himself into the car. ‘Might as well use it up now. So if the da wants to make up for years of not being there to protect Aislinn, and he doesn’t like the cut of Rory—’
‘Sweet fuck,’ I say, starting the Kadett and listening to it bitch about being woken up. ‘What if I pay you not to do this shite? Would that work?’
‘You should definitely give it a go. I take cheques.’
‘Do you take Snickers bars? Because at least you shut your gob when you’re eating.’
‘Ah, lovely,’ Steve says happily. ‘I’ll be good.’ I find the Snickers bar in my satchel and toss it into his lap, and he settles down to demolish it.
He doesn’t look like he’s thinking about what an inspiration I am, or what a tragic story. I know Steve is nowhere near the simple freckle-faced kid he plays on TV, but still: he looks like he’s thinking about chocolate.
‘What?’ he demands, through a mouthful.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘The bit of silence suits you, is all,’ and I catch myself grinning as I swing the car into the flow of traffic.
Chapter 8
We get back to an incident room full of nothing. Breslin is still out, presumably talking to Rory’s KAs; the floaters come in and out, fetching more nothing and dumping it on our big fancy desk. Stanton and Deasy turned up nothing at Aislinn’s work, no rumours of an affair with the boss or anyone else, no unrequited crushes either way, no office feuds, no stalkery clients. Meehan comes back from checking Rory’s route home to report that his times match the CCTV footage, meaning Rory didn’t take any major detours between Aislinn’s house and the last time he was caught on camera – although we’ve got no way of confirming what time he got home or what he did afterwards, so we can’t rule out a last-minute detour or a late-night excursion. Gaffney is running Aislinn’s KAs through the system, which spits out a load of traffic tickets, a couple of minor drug possession charges and one guy who smashed his brother’s windscreen with a Hoover. Reilly slouches in with more CCTV footage and a flat stare at me, settles down to watch some telly and occasionally lets out a noise halfway between a cough and a roar to remind us that he’s here and he’s bored.
I’m itching to look up Cueball Lanigan’s boys on the system, but I’m not gonna do it: I’d feel like a twat taking the gang thing that seriously, plus the search would be logged for anyone to find, just like we found the search someone ran on Aislinn last autumn. Instead I go through the statements from the door-to-door again, properly this time, looking for the little things that need following up. I’m not finding them – Gaffney went to town with the highlighter pen on one woman’s statement that she heard the guy in Number 15 roaring about killing someone a week or two back, but seeing as Number 15 has three teenagers, I figure we don’t need to break out the waterboarding equipment just yet. Steve cross-checks Aislinn’s phone records against her phone, and comes up with no discrepancies: no one’s been deleting texts or call logs, not Aislinn and not our guy. No calls or texts from unidentified numbers, either; every number is in her contacts list – and we’ll track down the contacts to make sure they are who the phone says they are – or else comes back to some customer service department. That has its good side – it’s a nice punch in the face for Steve’s cute little fantasy about an Aislinn-and-Daddy reunion – but I’d give a lot for just one text from an unregistered mobile saying Meet me for a shag by the heroin stash at 8.
Every investigation nets you plenty of nothing. You need that – it’s the only way you can narrow down your focus – and normally it feels good, slashing the dead ends off your whiteboard, leaving the live stuff to leap out at you big and bold. This time, though, there’s no slashing going on, just little bits of useless nothing splatting onto my desk like spitballs from some joker I can’t catch. That soaring buzz is turning to edginess, making me shift and knee-jiggle and rub away imaginary itches against the back of my chair. I need something, anything, that’ll zap away Steve’s great big fluffy cloud of if-based babble and leave me with the stuff solid enough to stand on. Incident Room C looks empty to the point of ridiculous, the half-dozen of us dotted around a room that would take thirty easily, the high ceiling and the shining rows of desks shrinking us to dollhouse size. I’m starting to wonder if Breslin was taking the piss out of us, getting the luxury suite for a two-cent case that would have fit in that ex-locker-room shithole with space left over.
At two o’clock we send Gaffney out for pizza, and Stanton pulls up one of the sob radio shows on his phone for lunchtime light relief. Sure enough, they’ve got a big segment about Aislinn, leading into a general outrage-fest about how the country is getting more dangerous for decent law-abiding citizens and the Guards don’t give a damn, complete with phone-ins from old ones who were mugged and left to die in pools of their own blood while uniforms stepped over them looking for a politician’s hole to lick. They even have Crowley on, being profound about how our cavalier attitude towards Aislinn’s murder and our oppressive bullying of geniuses like himself are both symbolic of the sickness of our society ‘on an almost mythic level’, whatever he thinks that means. For a minute there, while we all crease ourselves laughing, we forget what we think of each other.
‘My cousin went out with him for a while,’ Meehan says.
‘Your cousin’s got shite taste,’ Reilly tells him.
‘She does, yeah. She dumped him because he wouldn’t wear johnnies. He said they were a feminist conspiracy to suppress masculine energy.’
Everyone cracks up again. ‘Fucking beautiful,’ Stanton says, reaching to grab another slice. ‘I’m going to see if I can get away with that.’
‘Not a chance,’ I say. ‘If even someone thick enough to shag Crowley didn’t fall for it – no offence to your cousin, Meehan—’
‘Nah, you’re grand. She is thick. She lent the little bollix three grand so he could self-publish his autobiography.’ That sets everyone off again. ‘Never got a penny of it back.’
‘What’d he call it?’ Kellegher asks. ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye?’
‘Free Willy,’ I say. That gets a laugh with a startled edge, like half the floaters didn’t think I was able for it.
‘Here we go,’ Steve says, swiping at his phone. ‘Truth’s Martyr, by Louis Crowley— No, listen; there’s a review. Five stars. “A searing, towering dissection of one man’s odyssey to reveal the hidden shadows of Irish justice. If you care
at all about truth . . .” Jaysus, it’s longer than the book.’
‘Anyone want to put money on who wrote that?’ Stanton says.
‘How do you reveal a hidden shadow?’ Kellegher wants to know.
‘You lot are just part of the conspiracy,’ Meehan tells us all. ‘I bet you go around trying to put johnnies on poor unsuspecting fellas on the street.’
Reilly beckons to him. ‘C’mere till I stick one on you.’
‘It’d take three of yours.’
‘Here,’ Stanton says, throwing a greasy paper napkin at Meehan. ‘Suppress your masculine energy with that.’ Meehan slaps the napkin away and it goes into Kellegher’s coffee, and all of them start telling me that I need to write up the rest for harassment and creating a hostile workplace environment and wearing crap ties and farting in the unmarked cars. For that minute, the incident room feels like a good place.
‘I’m sure many Guards are fine people,’ Crowley tells us, from Stanton’s phone. ‘But when one of them practically assaults me, simply because I want to keep you informed on what they’re doing about this beautiful young woman’s death, then I think we all have to ask ourselves why she – or he, of course – is so desperate to control what we’re allowed to hear. After all—’
Underneath the solemn voice, he’s obviously creaming his chinos with delight: his story is taking on a life of its own, parallel to reality and getting a lot more traction. Reilly is grinning. ‘That’ll do,’ I say. The laugh has worn off; Crowley is giving me the sick. ‘Yous aren’t a shower of schoolkids. Get some work done.’ Stanton switches off the radio and they all turn back to their computers, throwing each other sideways glances and eyebrow-lifts about what a bitch I am, and the incident room goes back to normal.